Growing up with Business Sense

I had to learn to become resourceful and independent very early in life and to that end, as a young boy I was picking worms and collecting scrap metal and doing what I needed to do to make ends meet. I learned the art of the hustle very young, not because I wanted to be wealthy, but because I wanted clothes on my back and food to eat . My father, although employed, was incapacitated with post-traumatic stress from the Korean war. My mother had left and it was just he and I. If I wanted something, I needed to be able to find it for myself. As a school-aged kid I was riding through the alleys of Hamilton collecting scrap metal, cutting it into smaller pieces and putting it into bundles. I would take these bundles to a scrap yard and sell them. Aluminum, steel, copper and cast iron; a bundle for each type. As I would take things apart, I learned to use tools and all the concepts and principles of levers and wedges and screws (handy for my future osteopathic self). That was my day job as a kid in the summers, the fall and the spring but of course never in the winter because I was trying to play a little hockey. My night job as a kid was to go to the local golf course and collect worms and then take them to a local bait shop and sell them. As I started doing this alone I soon recognized that if I had two or three other people working with me, it could be a larger enterprise and we could share in whatever little profit we were making. So from a very early age my understanding of business started by necessity but grew from experience. I understood how commerce worked. How selling a product that fills a need is a win-win for everyone. When I became an osteopath and I started getting out there in practice I realized that the adult world was even more competitive. There were other therapists trading services for a fee and for me to be successful I would have to trade that service at a better price and a better quality. That was really the whole emphasis for the CAO education, a better price and a better quality.

The same goes for our graduates, a better quality treatment for their patients at a better price. Once you achieve that, the hardest part is to maintain the consistency all the way through. That’s where integrity comes in and this builds trust. I’ve used that as the model in everything we do at the school. When two people make a transaction, both people need to feel as though they’re winning out of this. When students come to my school, it’s a partnership.